Monday, March 7, 2011

What to Expect from the Coming 0.11 Dev Channel Update

According to Trond Wuellner, Google's Product Manager for Chrome OS, we should be seeing a 0.11 update to development channel released this week. So what should we expect to see in this update? Here are a few things gleaned from the issue tracker and my personal test builds of Chromium OS:

A window switcher icon will be placed at the very top right corner of the Cr-48 screen. This square box should function much like the "Next Window" button above the 6 and 7 on the Cr-48 keyboard.

WiFi ad-hoc support should be working in the first 0.11 builds. WPA/WPA2 Enterprise support is planned for 0.11 but may not be in the first development channel releases.

A fair amount of infrastructure work is going on for Chrome OS' Enterprise device policy manager. It's possible we'll see working support for policies in a 0.11 release. Not much use for home users but Network Admins (like me) will love this!

And of course the usual bug fixes, performance improvements and minor tweaks will take place. It's important though to point out that things tend to get much less stable as new code and features are introduced with a major dev version change. If you use your Cr-48 for production, you might strongly consider switching back to beta channel so that you stay on 0.10 for now. You can always find out how stable 0.11 is proving to be and decide to switch to it later.